Senate Democrats stayed true to their threat by blocking a behemoth funding package, but in a surprising turn of events, they were joined by several Senate Republicans to derail the legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and his caucus made it no secret that they would obstruct the government funding process over the last several days, demanding that Republicans strip the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill from the six-bill package. 

But the defection of seven GOP lawmakers – Sens. Ted Budd, R-N.C., Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Mike Lee, R- Utah, Ashley Moody, R-Fla., Rand Paul, R-Ky., Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. – was an unexpected development on Thursday. 

Senate Democrats are willing to support the five other bills in the package, however, and have reiterated that bundle would easily pass if given the chance. 

‘Democrats are ready to avert a shutdown,’ said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

‘We have five bills we all agree on. About 95% of the remaining budget. It is ready to go,’ she continued. ‘We can pass those five bills, no problem. All Leader Thune has to do is tee them up for a vote.’

But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., sought to call their bluff and barreled forward with the key test vote, which would have opened up several hours of debate and eventually a final vote to send the package to President Donald Trump’s desk.

Ahead of the vote, Thune said he hoped that conversations between the White House and Senate Democrats would produce the ‘the votes that are necessary to get it passed.’

Thune threw cold water on Senate Democrats’ several demands for reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) making their way into the current package, too. 

‘That’s not going to happen in this bill, but there are, I mean, there’s a path to consider some of those things and negotiate that out between Republicans, Democrats, House, Senate, White House,’ Thune said. ‘But that’s not gonna happen in this bill.’ 

With the six-bill package, which included major funding bills for the Pentagon and other agencies, now scuttled, Senate Republicans and the White House are looking for a plan B to keep the government open or to at least minimize the damage from a partial shutdown. 

One option gaining momentum among Republicans would be to strip the DHS funding bill from the broader package, advance the smaller, five-bill bundle and then turn to a short-term funding extension, known as a continuing resolution (CR), for just Homeland Security. 

And there are ongoing negotiations among Senate Democrats and the White House on that particular idea. 

A White House official told Fox News Digital in a statement, ‘President Trump has been consistent — he wants the government to remain open, and the Administration has been working with both parties to ensure the American people don’t have to endure another shutdown.’ 

‘A shutdown would risk disaster response funding and more vital resources for the American people,’ the official said. 

But taking that route presents several hurdles and challenges, particularly with the House out until next week.

That’s because any modification to the current six-bill package would require the lower chamber to agree to it. The same is true for any CR that the Senate produces for DHS. 

Schumer pinned the possibility of a shutdown on Thune, arguing that if he just put the five-bill package on the floor, Senate Democrats would support it. 

‘Well, let me tell you first, if funding lapses, it’s all because of Leader Thune,’ Schumer said. ‘It’s on his back.’

House Republicans have already signaled their unwillingness to support a modified funding package, and turning to a CR is a simmering taboo that many Republicans in the lower chamber aren’t likely to be happy with.

But it’s an option that could be gaining steam with Schumer and the White House, despite Trump administration officials blaming the top Senate Democrat for canning a meeting among rank-and-file Senate Democrats and the administration on Wednesday. 

Turning to a CR would be an about-face for Senate Democrats, too. Last week they argued that a short-term extension for DHS would amount to a ‘slush fund’ for Trump and the administration to use in their immigration operations with no guardrails.

A gold-standard guide used by judges nationwide to address subjects they are not particularly versed in is drawing criticism over the latest edition’s inclusion of purported ideological bias focused on its climate section.

Critics have said the fourth edition of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence – which includes a foreword by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan – appears to blur the line between neutrally educating judges and indoctrinating them with left-wing advocates’ prose.

The approximately 1,600-page guide was released at the beginning of the year and includes several citations and footnotes to climate change activists and proponents, including climatologist Michael Mann and environmental law expert Jessica Wentz.

Wentz is the topline expert at the Climate Judiciary Project at the Environmental Law Institute — an entity currently under federal investigation, as Fox News Digital recently reported.

‘The Committee on the Judiciary is investigating allegations of improper attempts by the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) and its Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to influence federal judges,’ read a statement from House Judiciary Committee members Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Jordan and Issa found evidence of efforts to ‘influence judges who potentially may be presiding over lawsuits related to alleged climate change claims… [which] appear to have the underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs alleging injuries from the manufacturing, marketing, use, or sale of fossil-fuel products.’

A spokesperson for the institute told Fox News Digital at the time that CJP’s curriculum is ‘fact-based and science-first, grounded in consensus reports and developed with a robust peer review process’ and that suggestions otherwise are ‘without merit.’

Wentz, who is also a senior fellow at Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Law, is listed as chief author of the section, along with fellow university faculty Radley Horton, on page 1561.

She served as a witness for the plaintiffs in Juliana v. U.S., where youth activists accused the U.S. government of violating their constitutional rights by failing to implement their preferred climate change policies.

She also signed an amicus brief supporting the Obama administration’s environmental regulations after multiple states filed lawsuits against the EPA in 2016.  

Nonetheless, legal experts warned of the potential repercussions down the line of having such prominent contributors in what is supposed to be an apolitical anthology.

‘It is alarming to see how far the Left has gone in its blatant effort to capture the judiciary. Its feeding of trial lawyers’ climate ‘science’ to sitting judges who will decide contentious litigation in this area short-circuits our system of justice,’ said Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and president of the Judicial Crisis Network.

‘When they can’t pass their extreme policies into law, they are attempting to use the courts as an end run around the legislative process,’ said Severino, whose organization has helped vet judicial nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Michael Fragoso of Torridon Law, former chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., agreed that there is rank bias throughout the climate section of the anthology.

‘The whole section of the guide is shockingly inappropriate—and if you look at the organizational meeting at the National Academies, intentionally so,’ Fragoso said.

‘But when you dig into it, it only gets worse. The section on attribution ‘science,’ for example, was lifted in large part by a previous article written by the two authors and Michael Burger, who is himself a climate-plaintiff lawyer.’

‘Given that attribution is at the heart of these lawsuits, it’s shocking that the Judicial Center would let a plaintiff lawyer ‘explain’ it to judges. It’s even worse that it’s hidden in a random footnote,’ said Fragoso, who recently analyzed a key energy-related suit in Louisiana.

The House Judiciary Committee previously alleged CJP’s efforts appear to have the underlying goal of predisposing federal judges in favor of plaintiffs involved in climate litigation.

Mann, a climate change academic in Pennsylvania, authored a book called ‘The New Climate War,’ and the judges’ guide cites the book to claim the energy industry has sought to deceive the public.

He resigned from a role at the University of Pennsylvania in 2025 after disparaging social media comments about Charlie Kirk that invoked the Hitler Youth movement, and previously successfully sued conservative commentator Mark Steyn for $1 million over aggressive criticism of his famous ‘hockey stick graph’ that resulted from his study of human influence on global warming over the centuries.

When asked about criticisms of her role in crafting the guide, Wentz told Fox News Digital, ‘no comment.’ Mann did not respond to a request for comment.

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind contributed to this report.

House Republicans are rolling out a massive election overhaul package ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, including new voter ID requirements as well as limitations on how and when votes are cast.

The Committee on House Administration is unveiling new legislation on Thursday called the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, which would impose new federal standards on national elections across the U.S.

The sprawling bill includes key portions of the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a measure that was led by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, in the House. It comes as the Senate sees a renewed pressure campaign led by Elon Musk and others to take up that legislation.

‘Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity — including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,’ Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said in a statement.

He said the bill’s guardrails ‘will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.’

Like the SAVE Act, the legislation would include mandatory proof of citizenship when a person registers to vote for the first time. 

Casting a ballot in federal elections would also require a photo ID. Progressive Democrats and groups like the League of Women Voters have argued that photo ID laws disenfranchise minority voters, while the Heritage Foundation pointed out that it’s shown to be popular across multiple public polls.

Steil’s elections bill would also ban ranked-choice voting in federal races, require states to use auditable paper ballots rather than electronic slips, and impose stronger requirements on voter list maintenance to ensure rolls are up to date.

New guardrails on mail-in ballots include a ban on universal mail-in ballots — meaning voters would have to specifically request one to receive it — while also requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day to count and banning ‘ballot harvesting’ by third parties aiming to deliver them to poll centers.

The new legislation comes ahead of what’s expected to be a difficult midterm election season for Republicans.

Historical trends dictate that the first midterms after power changes hands in Washington normally see that party in power suffer losses, but GOP leaders are publicly optimistic that they can reverse that trend.

Fox News Digital reached out to the White House to ask whether it supports Steil’s bill but did not hear back by press time.

Longtime Democratic consultant James Carville says Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker could potentially be his party’s best choice to lead Democrats to victory in the 2028 presidential election.

And Carville, who first gained national attention over three decades ago as the chief strategist for former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, argues that former Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t have a shot at winning the next Democratic presidential nomination.

The 2028 Democratic nomination battle in the race to succeed term-limited President Donald Trump is expected to draw a crowded and competitive field.

‘If I had to say one guy… I’d take JD Pritzker,’ Carville said this week in a sit-down interview with Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo on his ‘Arroyo Grande’ podcast. Carville was asked which Democrat he could see carrying the flag into 2028.

The billionaire governor, a member of the Pritzker family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain and who has started several of his own venture capital and investment startups, is running this year for a third term to steer Illinois.

And Pritzker, who has become a leading voice in the Democrats’ opposition to Trump and has taken steps to Trump-proof his solidly blue state, has made a handful of trips in recent years to the key early voting states in the race for the White House.

Carville noted that Pritzker ‘campaigns hard.’

Asked about whether he could see Harris as the party’s standard-bearer in 2028, Carville responded, ‘She has no chance.’

Harris replaced then-President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee after Biden dropped his bid in July of that year, a month after a disastrous debate performance against Trump. Harris ended up losing the general election to Trump, who narrowly swept all seven key battleground states.

‘No Democrat wants anything to do with anybody that had anything to do with 2024,’ Carville emphasized, as he reasoned why Harris couldn’t win the 2028 nomination. He also questioned whether Harris, the nation’s first female and first Black vice president, had the ability to energize the Black community if she launched another White House run.

Carville said that the Democrats’ mantra heading into 2028 is ‘just win,’ and argued that ‘if we nominate two white males, nobody’s going to give a s—.’

He also doubted whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York would be a good 2028 nominee for the party.

Carville said the progressive champion and rising Democratic Party star ‘has talent, and she’s very smart.’

But he said that ‘the reason she is not going to work’ is because ‘there’s a large part of the Democratic Party that like to feel smug.’ Carville argued that Ocasio-Cortez and others on the progressive left of the party have alienated male voters.

‘Democratic culture became very feminized and very judgmental and that’s why we pushed so many of the males away,’ Carville said.

Asked by Fox News Digital if there’s anyone else he thinks is worth watching as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, Carville mentioned former Louisiana Lt. Gov. and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.

Landrieu mulled but ultimately decided against a 2020 White House and later served in the Biden administration.

Carville, pointing to ‘two huge mistakes that the Democratic Party made,’ also blamed former President Barack Obama and Biden for Trump’s 2016 and 2024 White House wins.

Obama continued and implemented the unprecedented $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, which was initiated by then-President George W. Bush at the very end of his White House tenure to stabilize the nation’s financial system after the 2008-2009 crisis.

The program prevented a total economic collapse, but was widely unpopular with voters.

‘The mistake they made was not going after these bankers,’ Carville said in the podcast, as he pointed to moves by Obama and his administration. ‘We bailed them out.’

And Carville emphasized that ‘there is one person who is responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2024, and it’s not Donald Trump, it’s Joe Biden.’

Carville argued that if Biden ‘would have gotten out in September of 2023, it wouldn’t have been close.’

A Muslim activist who served a prison sentence for his role in an overseas terror plot is now seeking elected office in Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, as local elections approach amid heightened communal tensions.

Shahid Butt was convicted by a Yemeni court in 1999 and sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of forming an armed gang and conspiring to bomb the British consulate in Aden, an Anglican church and a Swiss-owned hotel in Yemen. At the time, Yemeni prosecutors said the group had been sent to carry out violence by Abu Hamza, the extremist preacher who was the father of one of the convicted men.

He is now standing as a candidate for the newly formed Independent Candidates Alliance in the May 7 Birmingham City Council elections.

Butt maintains his innocence, claiming his confession was coerced through torture, and that evidence against him was planted, The Daily Telegraph reported.

He will contest the Sparkhill ward, an area where nearly two-thirds of residents are of Pakistani background, according to The Daily Telegraph.

Butt’s candidacy comes as Birmingham — home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the U.K. — has faced renewed strains over foreign policy, identity politics and public order. Those tensions came into sharp focus last November when Israeli soccer club Maccabi Tel Aviv played Aston Villa in a Europa Conference League match.

Ahead of the game, Butt used social media to call on Muslims from around the country to travel to Birmingham to show solidarity with Palestinians and to prevent the Israeli team’s supporters from, in his words, ‘desecrating’ and ‘dirtying’ the city. In one post, he referred to the visiting fans as ‘IDF babykillers,’ according to Birmingham Live.

Authorities ultimately barred Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from attending the match, citing security concerns, after large-scale protests were planned.

In a video posted from a protest connected to the fixture, Butt made comments that critics say crossed from political speech into the endorsement of violence. ‘Muslims are not pacifists,’ Butt said in the video. ‘If somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out — that’s my message to the youth.’

Emma Schubart, a researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, said the developments reveal deeper fractures within British society. ‘Shahid Butt, a convicted terrorist, is standing for election in a ward that is around 80% Muslim. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned from the second-largest city in the U.K. which is now nearly a third Muslim,’ Schubart said.

‘Politically,’ she added, ‘These events foreshadow a likely Muslim sectarian sweep in the local elections, since candidates like Butt are poised to erode Labour’s hold on seats throughout Birmingham.’

The Independent Candidates Alliance was founded by activists Akhmed Yakoob and Shakeel Afsar, both of whom ran unsuccessfully in Birmingham constituencies during the 2024 general election on a pro-Gaza platform. The group is expected to field candidates in around 20 wards across the city.

Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is introducing legislation Thursday targeting fraud in federal programs — a proposal that would set early-warning tripwires to flag suspected scams and push agencies to claw back taxpayer dollars, Fox News Digital has learned.

‘It’s absolutely unacceptable that the fraud running rampant in Minnesota could end up costing taxpayers more than $9 billion,’ Ernst told Fox News Digital. ‘My Putting an N to Learing about Fraud Act will ensure this never happens again by putting more safeguards in place to detect scams early and require the recovery of any money ripped off from taxpayers.’

Ernst’s office said the bill is designed to hit fraud on two fronts: tightening rules around childcare payments and creating new spike alerts in healthcare programs to flag suspicious surges early, while also pushing the federal government to recover improper payments.

If passed, the bill would force state plans tied to federal childcare dollars to pay providers based on documented attendance — not just enrollment — to prevent taxpayer money from going out for care that never happened.

It also underlines that states can reimburse providers after services are delivered rather than paying upfront. Providers taking federal funds would have to track attendance and keep those records for seven years, making them available for audits by the Department of Health and Human Services, the attorney general and the comptroller general.

On the healthcare front, the legislation would create new notification requirements tied to abrupt jumps in health billings and costs. States would be required to notify Health and Human Services when the amount being paid for a service increases by more than 100% in a year, or if the number of providers seeking payment increases by 100% in a year. 

Beyond early detection, the bill aims to force agencies to claw back funds either swindled from taxpayers or received in error.

It would direct the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance to federal agencies to ensure improper payments are recovered and require inspectors general to report annually the amount of improper payments recovered by each agency.

The legislation follows the sweeping fraud scandal that continues to plague Minnesota. Dozens of arrests have been made, most of whom are from the state’s large Somali population, as investigators uncover hundreds of millions of dollars in alleged fraud swindled from taxpayers through welfare and social services programs. 

Federal prosecutors have said the fraud could total $9 billion. 

‘The swindlers in Minnesota and everywhere else soon are going to ‘lear’ the hard way that in the era of DOGE, crime no longer pays,’ Ernst added in a comment to Fox News Digital, referring to the viral ‘Quality Learing Center.’ 

The misspelled Quality ‘Learing’ Center daycare sign became a focal point of the fraud scandal after YouTube journalist Nick Shirley dug into alleged fraud in Minnesota. 

Fox News Digital learned that Ernst will also name Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as the January recipient of her office’s ‘Squeal Award’ for ‘failing to stop the runaway fraud in his own backyard.’ Ernst awards various lawmakers and government fraud scandals themselves the Squeal Award each month to spotlight ‘out of control waste.’

The governor dropped out of his re-election effort earlier in January amid the fallout of the fraud scandal. Walz, who has served as governor since 2019, took ownership of the fraud as it occurred under his watch, but argued multibillion-dollar figures were ‘sensationalized’ by Republicans. 

‘Whoever is in charge. Unlike the president, I’m governor now (and) whether these programs happen before we got here or afterwards, it doesn’t matter. We’re here now. We’re the ones fixing it. You have my guarantee on this, that I certainly will have this thing fixed,’ Walz said earlier in January. 

Fox News Digital reached out to his office on Thursday morning for additional comment. 

Ernst has long positioned herself as a leading Senate watchdog on waste and fraud, working with both Congress and the Trump administration to flag questionable spending. 

She launched and leads the Senate Department of Government Efficiency caucus as President Donald Trump readied to reclaim the Oval Office, which works to snuff out government spending, reduce bureaucracy and enforce transparency, producing more than $15.1 billion in real savings.

: The electric grid kept the lights on for much of the country hit by the weekend’s massive snowstorm chiefly because the Trump administration broke from Biden-era plans, keeping five major coal-fired power plants online and allowing grid providers to draw in more fossil fuel-based energy in vulnerable areas.

The Energy Department made the claims in exclusive comments to Fox News Digital, as officials said multiple megawatts of power were made additionally available from otherwise taboo hydrocarbons.

Secretary Chris Wright issued several emergency orders over the weekend and through Tuesday that permitted power plants to operate beyond levels set by EPA regulations and considered the ceiling prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, a source familiar with the situation told Fox News Digital.

Five such plants were on track to be closed under the Biden-era push to pivot from fossil fuels to green energy, the official said, adding that the Trump administration was prepared to give energy producers leeway to push more power online to reduce risks of blackouts. The Trump administration saved 17 gigawatts of coal power that were going to be forcibly shut down as well, Fox News has learned.

‘We told grid providers: if your energy demand reaches a critical level… let us know,’ the official said, adding that there is a direct correlation between the power being saved up and what was needed to keep the lights on as states from Alabama to Vermont were hammered with wintry weather and deep freezes.

As the storm approached, Wright informed grid operators to be prepared to use more than 35 gigawatts of unused backup generation nationwide, sourced from anywhere from data centers to big-box stores, bypassing prior environmental regulations by emergency order.

That gave a wide buffer against blackouts and hundreds of millions in emergency costs for Americans — as 1 gigawatt is enough to power Wright’s hometown Denver metro area alone.

‘How power sources perform during peak electricity demand reveal their true value,’ Energy Department press secretary Ben Dietderich told Fox News Digital.

‘Across the country, wind and solar generation plummeted while natural gas, coal and oil plants did the majority of the work keeping the lights on during the storm. According to DOE data, the Biden administration’s support for forcibly closing reliable coal and natural gas plants had America on track to see blackouts increase 100 times over by 2030.’

‘Thankfully, President Trump was elected and has already prevented the forced closure of five coal plants and more than 17 gigawatts of reliable coal power,’ Dietderich added.

Dietderich said the Trump administration and Wright continue to be committed to ‘unleashing’ affordable and reliable energy that works — ‘whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining,’ a common administration reference to the unreliability of those forms of green energy when those natural power sources aren’t present.

As the storm approached, Wright remarked that the Trump administration ‘will not stand by and allow the previous administration’s reckless energy subtraction policies and bureaucratic red tape put American lives at risk.’

The structure of the department’s emergency preparations is also meant to save American lives, he said.

In that regard, wind and solar power only accounted for 10% of the energy utilized across the storm’s path.

Hydrocarbons and coal, by contrast, provided 68% of the power in those same areas, a power source often maligned on the left.

The department noted that in New England — where renewable and green energy sources are often put on the proverbial pedestal — nearly two-thirds of the energy utilized was sourced from hydrocarbon-based or coal-fired power.

American coal power itself provided enough electricity for 30 million homes across the storm’s path, the department said.

Fox News Digital reached out to President Biden’s representatives for comment.